Miltos Manetas
By Michael Odom
Miltos Manetas began making paintings In 1995, some time after he had become a devotee of computers and mastered image-processing software, so it is no surprise that laptops, Zip drives, data cables, and digital-game components populate his works. But beyond providing subjects for still lifes and props for figure studies, the "coolness" of computer technology, its cut-and-paste power over images, has led the artist to an analogous casualness about the vocabulary of painting that permits him to freely sample styles of rendering and strategies of composition.
The series "Eight Perfect Paintings" (all works 1999) formed the central installation in his recent show. Identical in scale and format and sharing the name Untitled (PowerBook), each six-foot-wide canvas is a brushy rendering of the cover of a closed Apple PowerBook laptop, which completely fills the rectangle of the picture plane like a Jasper Johns flag painting. Varying shades of blue-gray casually cover, or nearly cover, undercoats of gold, intense blue, or paler gray, providing a degree of difference from painting to painting.
Two white bars float near the top of each canvas, suggesting hinges, while a loose rendering of the Apple corporate logo punctuates the lower middle, a bright little pimple of absurd color in a foggy monochrome surround.
The atmospheric effects of Manetas's technique imply an indeterminate interior to his surfaces, hinting at the visual promise of an LCD screen and evoking an ominously crepuscular Rothko abstraction. But like Johns's flags, the proportions of Manetas's paintings are determined by their subject and are all wrong for a soaring Rothko.
An elegant but vacant techno-power has superseded the expressionist's spiritual suffering. In a real sense, these "perfect" paintings owe their design not to the artist but to industrial designers at Apple Computer, Inc., who gave an expensive hightech look, suggestive of serious purpose and understated competence, to a product doomed to rapid obsolescence. I take the "perfect" in the title as referring more to grammar--as in "past perfect"--than to the attainment of an ideal. The spirit, if not the technique, is thus much closer to Johns's flags and their implications of expression deferred to the demands of a found object.
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